Sunday, 8 April 2012

No audience

An Easter Sunday declension: pure, purer & Hildur Gudnadottir. Perhaps that over-eggs it, since she also deploys her voice & unspecified 'electronics'. But not by much, as the gorgeous Prelude to her forthcoming Leyfdu ljosinu makes clear - its ultra-narrow palette & lack of obvious varnish forcing focus onto the complex shifts of tone & mood she summons from her multi-channelled strings.

Blurb: "Hildur Gudnadottir's new album Leyfdu ljosinu (Icelandic
for 'Allow the light'), was recorded live at the Music Research
Centre, University of York, in January 2012 by Tony Myatt, using a
SoundField ST450 Ambisonic microphone and two Neumann U87 microphones.
(NB - It was not played in a concert environment and there was no
audience.)

To be faithful to time and space - elements vital to the movement
of sound - this album was recorded entirely live, with no
post-tampering of the recordings' own time and space."

Background from Touch's Mike Harding (taken from the final part of The Liminal's epic Touch 30 interview): "Hildur Gudnadottir is also doing a multi-channel live recording in York
University with Tony Myatt. If this is the end of the CD album era, one
thing that is missing is the multi-channel, 24 bit file. Bleep.com did a
version for Autechre, and they have approached us to do Touch stuff in
multichannel 24 bit. So we are making sure that is possible with the
Hildur one, as that is a good way forward."

These ears appreciated the recent Ambarchi a fair bit, but this promises to be the first indisputably great Touch release of the venerable not-a-label's 30th anniversary. It won't be the last, of course...

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